Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Please know, proud Virginians, that your civil servants in the state's Attorney General's office are fighting for you! They are putting their best and brightest minds to work to keep a boy from clearing his name from a sex offender registry after his accuser admitted he didn't rape her.

This, of course, is an entirely prudent use of precious taxpayer resources to protect Virginia's fragile young women from boys who don't rape. After all, rapists or not, they are still boys.

Why stop there? Why not force the creature to live thousands of feet away from schools, libraries, bus stops and every other place where Virginia's precious, beloved children congregate (otherwise known as "civilization") and exile him to live with real sex offenders and lunatics in the forest or under a highway overpass -- where he will almost certainly become the victim of the very act his false accuser admits he did not do.

Ha ha! That will tame his natural male predatory instincts! After all, Virginia's daughters will only be safe when Virginia's sons have been beaten down and emasculated.

The Virginia Attorney General's office has been given an extension of its deadline for responding to a civil suit filed by a former Aquia Harbour teen currently on the state sex offender registry for a rape his accuser says didn't happen.

The boy, who is now 18, sued the state Department of Juvenile Justice in an effort to clear his name of his convictions and get his name off the public registry.

The attorney general's office is representing the Department of Juvenile Justice and has until Nov. 4 to file its response in Stafford Circuit Court. The lawsuit was filed Aug. 18, and a response was originally due last Friday. The boy's attorneys agreed to the delay that was requested by the attorney general's office.

I love the emotive way that stories are written. What purpose is there to specifying that this woman has a 14 month old child? How is that germane to the fact that she falsely cried rape?

It isn't. It is nothing more than an effort to elicit sympathy for the criminal. And it is both disgusting, and a slap in the face both for those who are falsely accused, and those who truly have been raped.

Oh, and the reason for the false claim? She cheated on the boyfriend. Nice.

A night of infidelity covered up by a snowballing lie came unstuck for a young Palmerston North mother.

Jaimee-Lee Fawcett, 19, received a six-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay police and ACC reparations of more than $1200 in the Palmerston North District Court yesterday for making a false allegation of rape.

Police prosecutor Sergeant Chris Whitmore told the court Fawcett had made the false statement after she told her boyfriend she was raped by a man she had met during a night out drinking.

Her boyfriend had then persuaded her to complain to police, which she did on June 30 but she had made up a name for the man she alleged had raped her.

Fawcett had also lied to police about her nationality, saying she was American.She withdrew the allegations on July 19 and admitted that, while she had cheated on her boyfriend, no rape had taken place.

Judge Grant Fraser told Fawcett she escaped more serious punishment only because nobody was arrested after her false statement.

"Had any persons been arrested ... then the offending would have taken on a totally different complexion for sentencing proposes.

"The offending was stupid in the extreme," Judge Fraser said.

Fawcett's lawyer, Jacinda Younger, said her client, who has a 14-month-old baby, did not want to admit to her boyfriend that she had been unfaithful, as he was her only means of financial support.

"She got caught up in a lie that snowballed on her ... It's been an awful wake-up call for her," Ms Younger said.

We have been confronted with this argument many times at False Rape Society, and refusing to increase sentences for fear of putting of would-be recanters is exactly the wrong approach. It is our belief that such approach would only serve to perpetuate, indeed encourage, a vicious cycle of more and more false rape claims.

The solution to the false rape problem is not to continue to hand women and girls the power to lie and destroy with impunity the lives of innocent men and boys (and I mean literally without punishment), all in the hope that some of the false accusers could, or might, or possibly will -- decide, at their own whim and discretion, to recant and spare the falsely accused victim further pain. The solution is to deter these lies from ever happening in the first place, as much as possible.

At present, there are innumerable false rape cases where the accuser does not recant, despite the absence of serious punishment for lying about rape. So, relying on recantations to spare falsely accused men is a slender reed on which to rest any argument about increasing maximum prison sentences for false accusers.

We advocate a sliding scale for sentencing, allowing lenient punishment for recantations that occur before identifying a specific individual; greater punishment after identifying but before an arrest, etc. Early recantations should be encouraged and rewarded, but even they need to be subjected to more serious punishments than currently exist. This will have the salutary effect of encouraging early recantations.

It is well to note that fears about discouraging would-be recanters with increased sentences are based on the present state of our law and culture where false accusers know they can lie with impunity and there is no effective deterrence whatsoever. If the law is changed to impose greater sentences for false rape reporting, it will be clear that lying about rape is a serious crime, like rape, and there will be far, far fewer Hofstras.

Every other criminal act is assigned a sentence, in part, to deter others from committing that act based on the seriousness of the act. The more serious the crime, greater the need for deterrence, and the greater the sentence. (There are, of course, other purposes for sentencing as well, but deterrence is an important one.) Underlying the claim that increasing sentencing will hurt innocent men seems to be an unstated belief that deterrence simply does not work. That belief, of course, bucks centuries of collective wisdom.

False rape accusers lie because they can, and because they believe they have some need to do so. If we convince them they can't lie -- at least not without serious consequences -- it is likely we'll see a significant decrease in false rape claims.

In addition, it is a matter of simple justice that false rape claimants deserve to be punished in a manner consistent with the serious harm they cause. At present, that isn't happening.

This is among the more important posts we've done here, because it goes to the crux of the false rape problem.

Perhaps the single most glaring reason false rape accusations are not deterred is that making a false rape report is not treated in our criminal statutes as a serious crime. Our criminal laws are supposed to be statutory articulations of how seriously society disapproves of various forms of misconduct. A good indicator of how much society disapproves of a particular crime is the maximum allowable sentence for its commission. The maximum sentence for rape, for example, is typically second in number of years only to murder. In contrast, the statutory laws that punish false rape claims are proverbial slaps on the wrists. The maximum sentences often allow just six months to two years, depending on the jurisdiction.

In addition, our criminal statutes often do not treat false reporting of rape any more seriously than false reporting of other crimes. This is so even though: (1) the FBI tells us that false rape reporting is multiple times more common than false reporting of other crimes (and it is more common because it is so easy to do -- the he said/she said nature of the rape claim means that it's usually impossible to know for sure if she lied), and (2) a man or boy convicted of rape will serve more prison time on average than for any crime except murder.

It has become obvious to many people in recent years that false reporting of rape is a special problem in need of special attention. The brilliant legal scholar Professor Alan Dershowitz said: “Rape is such a serious crime that deliberately bringing a false accusation of rape should be an equally serious crime and women are not being punished for those crimes. I believe that being falsely accused of rape is as traumatic as being raped.”

Exactly how did we reach this point? Until relatively recently our criminal laws typically required some form of corroborative evidence to prove rape. In days gone by, the lone accusation of a woman or a girl was not enough to charge or convict for rape. Starting in the 1970s, rape laws underwent sweeping reforms to make it easier to convict men and boys. The requirement of corroboration was among the first casualties of the old laws. Feminist legal scholars provided the intellectual firepower to justify the changes in the law. They insisted, contrary to what we now know is true, that women hardly ever lie about rape. It was during this era that the two percent canard (i.e., only two percent of all rape claims are false) was invented out of whole cloth. Due to these changes in the law, fueled by dishonest statistics, it is now possible to charge and to convict men and boys of rape solely on the say-so of lone accuser. Men and boys, for the first time, face the spectre of having their lives destroyed if a false accuser is a good enough actress. As but one recent example, because it is not necessary to have corroboration, it was possible to arrest and charge four innocent men at Hofstra University based on the say-so of one "troubled" young woman.

When the laws requiring corroboration were repealed, the power of a lone accuser was greatly enhanced. She could send her rapist to prison for many years. The trouble was, she could also send an innocent man or boy to prison for many years. Because of the political climate, it was verboten to discuss the possibility that the rape accuser might misuse her newly enhanced power, or to suggest that the misuse of this power should have serious consequences. Such sentiments were contrary to the culturally accepted myth that women don't lie about rape. In short, society handed theoretically every female in America the power to destroy theoretically any male above a certain age, but it didn't bother to change the laws to penalize the misuse of that power. We are still stuck with the old false reporting statutes that were in place back before the need for corroboration was eliminated from our rape laws.

Political correctness be damned, women do lie about rape, and frequently. The fact that we have given females the power to destroy men and boys means that we need to hold them accountable for misusing that power. As Professor Dershowitz said, they are not being held accountable at present.

We need to amend our criminal statutes to impose greater penalties for false reporting of rape and sexual assault. Only then will false accusers be deterred. Only then will they be punished justly. And only then will we treat the victimization of our sons with the seriousness that we treat the victimization of our daughters.

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN (BosNewsLife)-- A Pakistani Christian teenager was behind bars Wednesday, August 26, after being beaten on "false" charges of "blasphemy" and several Muslims have demanded a death sentence for him, his family and supporters, rights investigators said.

The group International Christian Concern (ICC) said 18-year-old Safian Masih, who lives in a mixed neighborhood of both Christians and Muslims, is held in a prison of the city of Gujranwala, in Pakistan's Punjab province. “His family has fled their home because they fear for their safety” after a mob “also threatened to kill anyone who helped Safian or his family,” ICC added.

ICC linked the imprisonment to an incident August 8 when the young daughter of one of his Muslim neighbors demanded that Safian bring her items from the grocery store. When Safian refused she reportedly slapped him, and the young man apparently slapped her back, escalating the argument to include both families.

“After the altercation, the girl’s parents allegedly accused Safian of trying to rape their daughter. "When other Muslims heard this, they gathered and severely beat him. After beating him, they submitted a report to the police accusing Safian of rape, and had him handed over to police custody and jail,” Christians said.

BLASPHEMY CHARGES

Two days later, on August 10, “the Muslims changed their story and accused Safian of blasphemy instead of rape. They claimed that the girl was attending a madrassa, [or Muslim school], to learn about the Koran,” seen as a holy book by Muslims, according to ICC investigators. “When Safian encountered her he took her Koran and tore out its pages,” the Muslims allegedly told police.

After hearing this, some Muslims attacked Safian again and beat him so badly that they forced him to “admit” that he had “blasphemed” the Koran, ICC said. "They then handed him over to the police again. On August 14, a Muslim mob gathered and demanded that Safian be put to death as well as family members or supporters.

"His family apparently remained in hiding Wednesday, August 26. The incident is the latest in a series of reported attacks against Christians in Punjab province. “In Pakistan, Christians live as second-class citizens and repeatedly face violence from the Muslims majority,” claimed ICC representative Jonathan Racho.

“Muslims easily exacerbate small disagreements and call for the execution or even murder of Christians. While ICC does not condone Safian’s slapping of a Muslim girl, it is unconscionable for Muslims to call for his death.”

ICC said it had urged its supporters around the world to “pray for the safety of Safian and his family” and to contact Pakistani embassies in their country to ask for his release.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Somehow my guess is that if this story involved a teen girl and male abuser, it would be the biggest story in America tonight:

Okla. teen claims he was held in closet for years

OKLAHOMA CITY – A woman was arrested after her 14-year-son told authorities he escaped from a home where he'd been kept for 4 1/2 years, spending most of his time locked in a bedroom closet, police said Monday.

A security guard at a National Guard facility in Oklahoma City called police on Friday after the teen showed up malnourished and with numerous scars and other signs of abuse, police Sgt. Gary Knight said.. . . .He told police that scars on his stomach and torso were from where alcohol had been poured on him and set on fire. Other scars were from being tied up, hit with an extension cord and choked, the boy told police.

"He had scars covering most of his body," Knight said. "They were basically from head to foot."

The teen told police he moved to the Oklahoma City area from New Jersey about 4 1/2 years ago after his mother was released from jail. Since arriving in Oklahoma, he said, he had never been to school and spent most of his time locked in a bedroom closet.

On Roman Polanski: I offer no opinion because I have not followed it as closely as many, many others. But this article has an interesting quote that speaks to what we do here, too: "'To see him thrown to the lions and put in prison because of ancient history - and as he was traveling to an event honoring him - is absolutely horrifying,' French Culture Minister FrÉdÉric Mitterrand said after Polanski was arrested upon arrival in Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival, where he was to receive a lifetime achievement award. 'There's an America we love and an America that scares us, and it's that latter America that has just shown us its face.'"

At this site, we see the face of the America that scares us almost every day. It's the punitive, full-bodied chivalrous face that views male sexuality as dangerous and evil. It's the face that adopts a zero tolerance for even unproven "sex" allegations, and takes the approach of arrest-'em-first-ask-questions-later. It's the face that insists on treating men like animals even after they've served their time for sex offenses. It's the face that prefers to lock up an innocent man or boy rather than take a chance that he might harm my daughter, and not feel the slightest guilt about it, and not even worry that someday it might be my son somebody else will have locked up. So, yes, we "get" it. We definitely "get" it.

Feminists know for a fact certain things that no reasonable person can say with certainty. For example, they know for a fact the exact number of women actually raped each year. They know for a fact the exact percentage for underreporting of rapes. And they know for a fact the exact percentage of false rape claims. (The "facts" that the feminists "know" do not comport with even reasonable estimates proffered by objective observers, but that is beyond the scope of this post.)

But when they are confronted with irrefutable proof that no rape occurred, they lose all ability to speak with feminist infallibility and quickly and solemnly proclaim that "no one will ever know for a fact what happened in this particular case."

This, of course, is intended to suggest that a rape very well might have been committed. It is a common tactic of theirs (we saw it in the Duke lacrosse case, we see it now in the Hofstra false rape case, and we've seen it in numerous other less well known false rape cases), and it is dishonest in the extreme.

Hofstra has sent to its alumni a copy of the public statement it issued promising to insure its campus is secure. My hunch is that this was written immediately after the rape allegation, and that after the recantation, the college's administrators simply altered to make it more generic. But it clearly seems more addressed to rape and similar crimes as opposed to false rape claims. If that's correct, we have yet another instance where false rape claims are used as an occasion to panic people about an entirely unrelated crime, rape. The following is from Professor KC Johnson's blog:

"In response to the filing of false sexual assault charges by one of his institution’s students, Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz issued a statement, in which he asserted:

"We will redouble our educational efforts and try to increase awareness among students, faculty, and staff of any potential signs of danger or dangerous behavior, and the need to pass that information on to Public Safety so that it can be adequately and appropriately addressed . . . I will be appointing a Presidential Task Force under the direction of the Vice President for Student Affairs and the Vice President for Facilities and Operations and consisting of representatives from students, faculty and administrators, to undertake a review of all aspects of security, including operations, communications, programs, policies and procedures to insure that we are taking every possible precaution to maintain a secure and safe campus. In addition, we will once again be seeking to utilize the services of an outside consultant to conduct a security audit and make recommendations as to best practices and possible enhancements to our program."

"Again: the issue in this case was a Hofstra student making up a false rape claim. How would a security audit address that issue—will Hofstra security officers increase campus patrols, on the lookout for women who make false rape claims in their midst?"

A Delhi court today ordered criminal prosecution of a woman and her minor daughter, taking strong exception to their acts of implicating a man with rape charge and then retracting from their statements.

Additional Sessions Judge Nivedita Anil Sharma acquitted Sunil of the charge of rape under Section 376 and molestion under Section 354 of the IPC, finding no evidence against him.

The court said those who file false cases should not be spared as they abuse the process of law and waste the time of courts and the police machinery.

“Such type of litigants who without any justified reason drag the matter for several years or file false cases/FIRs should not be pardoned as it has not only caused unnecessary harrassment to the accused but also caused wastage of the time of the police,” the court said, adding they also undermined the authority of law.

The prosecution had alleged Sunil, a resident of Vikaspuri in West Delhi, raped the victim in February 2007.

She also alleged he outraged the modesty of her 13-year-old daughter.

In her statement before a Metropolitan Magistrate, she had deposed against the accused but resiled during the trial stating she had lodged the false case on pressure from her advocate.

The court ordered their trial for perjury on a plea made by Public Prosecutor Vinod Kumar Sharma who submitted that non-prosecution of complainants would set a bad example in society.

While Mr. Doke certainly sounds like he is a contentious individual, no one deserves to be falsely accused of rape. The fact that the accusation was levelled by someone with a history of false accusations, and that law enforcement overstepped on this one, would tend to support the claim that if it hadn't been Mr. Doke, this wouldn't have gone as far as it did.

Jim Doke, a “reluctant Greeley resident,” he said, is doing just that. But he can only shake his head in disappointment, hanging onto a dwindling hope that his circumstances will soon become remnants of a bad dream.

He looks back and wonders how a lifetime of riches and success became failures, enough to land him in a dingy downtown Greeley motel for the last two months, with nowhere to go. Staring at four tobacco-stained walls every day, he is comforted only by the noise of CSPAN on the television and the whir of a computer counting his meager $2 stocks.

Doke turned 65 in that tiny room, amid his boxes of Swisher Sweets cigars, uneaten food from Meals on Wheels and memories of his homesteaded farm in Mead.

Several months ago, he still had that home, though he was facing some serious financial troubles. He still had four vehicles. He still had his farming equipment. He thought he had at least one good friend.But the blinding trust of friendship helped shatter Doke's world.

He was accused of rape and jailed for more than three months before officials realized they couldn't prove their case. The woman, a mental patient, apparently lied, prompting even the prosecutor to call her the most “out-of-touch-with-reality victim he'd ever seen.”

But the accusation did its damage — emotionally and financially. He has nothing left.“Even being cleared, there is a fog that's quite heavy that hangs over me,” Doke said. “You can't get rid of it.”

Fueling the fire

Doke's troubles began a few years back when officials in Weld County government ordered him to remove some trailers from his 120-acre property in Mead, a tiny town northeast of Longmont. There, he farmed sod and pocketed a few bucks for his efforts.

The retired airline pilot was admittedly a bit more independent than he should have been. He built a pile of dirt to hide the trailers, but he didn't remove them. Two years later, in 2006, the county had had enough and sent two Weld County Sheriff's Office deputies to serve him civil papers.

One knock on the door led to a 10-hour standoff. As far as Doke was concerned, these two strangers were trespassing, and he had every right not to answer his door. He ignored them until they grew serious enough to bring in the SWAT team. They pummeled his home with 18 canisters of gas. His dog later died.

“They didn't do anything right. They didn't do anything legal,” Doke said of the officers involved the standoff. “They didn't have a right to be there, and the judge told them that. I knew I was within my rights.

“There's plenty of people out here that liked the idea that I stood up for my rights. But there were also plenty of people who said I was some kind of a freakshow for challenging anything a policeman might say.”

Doke was jailed for that incident, but he was acquitted of all charges except one: obstructing a peace officer. While in jail, a female friend, Barbara, wrote to him every day. Then, later, he put a new engine in her truck, but he wouldn't return it to her until she paid him for it. She told police he stole it. He earned a misdemeanor theft by receiving charge, for which he remains on probation today.

“The car was sitting there waiting to be paid for. It was no different than any car dealer would do,” Doke said. “If you want to say I'm a really bad guy because of something like that, I guess you have an argument.”

But the woman's later troubles in a mental hospital invoked Doke's sense of duty to a friend. She had, after all, written to him in jail years before.

Then she accused him of rape in March.

“The rape charge, that should not have been brought,” said Bob Ray, Doke's former attorney who saw him through his other troubles with Weld County but not the rape case. “They should have looked at who was bringing the charges. Had it been anyone else but Jim Doke, they wouldn't have. He was wrongfully accused, wrongfully prosecuted, and that was the final nail in the coffin.”

The accusation

When Barbara needed help, Doke came to her aid. He got her out of a hospital on mental health issues and tried to help her get off her medications. She stayed with him off and on, and he tried to see her through her illness last winter. Then, out of nowhere, she claimed rape, calling police while they were at Walmart waiting on an oil change in her truck. When he went to look for her in the store, he was confronted by police. She had told police that he held her against her will at his home, raped her repeatedly and wouldn't allow her to leave for days. Yet they were at Walmart together, and he was paying for an oil change on her truck so she could go home.

In a flash, Doke was in jail on a $500,000 bond. He swears he never had any sexual relations with her. Their only contact was when she had a seizure and he was trying to help her through it.During his incarceration, he lost his farm and everything on it, circumstances that were already in motion before then because of a lien he'd placed against the home from a previously bad housing development deal in the late ‘90s. It was just easier to lose the farm when he wasn't there to fight for it. After about 110 days in jail, Doke was released as a free man upon revelations the woman may have falsely accused him.

He sat in the lobby of the Weld County Jail for 20 hours after his release, sitting in uncomfortable loneliness on hard, plastic chairs. Officials had lost his phone; he couldn't remember phone numbers stored in it. He had few longtime friends, many with whom he only corresponded through e-mail, and he didn't want to bother them. His wife, from whom he was separated, his kids, all did not come to help — a story Doke insists is still a bit of a mystery to him. He knows he neglected his family through the years. Maybe they were just embarrassed at the spectacle his charges created.

He had nowhere to go. A little more than a month later, the Weld District Attorney's Office dropped the charges. The woman had made several false accusations before in Jefferson County, and prosecutors realized she wasn't credible — though not so incredible that they'd charge her with false reporting.

“We don't think we can convict on sexual assault, and we don't think we can convict on false reporting,” said Weld District Attorney Ken Buck, stopping short of saying the woman's story was false.

An imperfect system

The door may as well have hit Doke on his backside on his way out of the Weld County Courthouse. While all sorts of measures are in place to help crime victims, there's nothing to help people wrongly charged.

“The system is imperfect,” Buck said. “ ... We don't want to charge innocent people. We don't want to let dangerous people prey on our community. So in between, there are situations where judgment calls are made on one side or the other.”

Greeley attorney Maria Liu knows something about wrongful accusations. Her firm is suing a college student who falsely accused a man of rape. He lost his scholarship at the University of Northern Colorado, housing and was banned from campus.Liu also has represented Timothy Masters, who was freed last year after serving almost 10 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, and one in which DNA evidence cleared him as a suspect.

“In Colorado, we don't have financial mechanisms or social structures to help people who have been wrongly convicted and wrongly accused,” Liu said. “Whether it's three months in jail or nine years in jail. Still something failed ... and maybe police and prosecutors should be a bit more careful about reviewing evidence.”

Doke is angry. He has no money to retain a lawyer to sue his accuser, or the Weld Sheriff's office or Weld County, which he'd like to do. He can't find a lawyer willing to work on contingency, let alone take on the government.

He is stuck in a judicial system ready to slap him back in a jail cell upon the slightest infraction. His latest concern is that he's being brought up in court for probation violation for not paying fees.

“They not only took my dignity, my reputation and my money and my freedom away, but even cleared of those accusations and the previous ones also, I am ‘that guy,' ” he said. “And, you get the feeling — the distinct feeling — that you're guilty until proven innocent. And that attitude prevails. Even if you're proven innocent, there's still that fog.”

Life after jail

Doke called his former attorney, Bob Ray, from the jail lobby, who gave him money to get a hotel room for a few days. He later moved to another downtown hotel paying $170 a week for a bed, a bathroom and an air conditioner. A childhood friend from Mead, who now lives in Greeley, came to his aid, often helping with trips to Walmart for food and other provisions like rides to court or probation and the seemingly non-stop trips to the Social Security office.

Doke has spent the last two months fighting to keep his Social Security. It was taken from him when he was in jail, and he's had to fight a mountainous bureaucracy to get it back. To this day, he still isn't sure if it will be back for good.

“I don't want to live on the dole,” said Doke, who worked as a commercial airline pilot until he was 51. “I don't mind Social Security because I paid for that.”

He's severely depressed, and he may have diabetes. He can't walk long distances, and he has no health insurance. He lost another tooth recently, which makes chewing food difficult (hence the uneaten Meals on Wheels food). He has no pension because the airlines he worked for went bankrupt. He lost his fortune over a residential housing development in Severance years ago.

“I don't know what is in the future here,” Doke said. “My crystal ball is broke, and I used to be able to tell you and be pretty accurate. Now, I'm lucky to just make it from the bed to the bathroom.”

Reflections

With few phone calls or visitors into his new home in a town he doesn't know, Doke spends a lot of time thinking on his bed, which takes up much of his living space.

He trades stocks on his computer — about $1,000 and the only insurance fund he has — to try to make another few bucks, as he's too old for work, and physical ailments would prevent it anyway. He built his first fortune on stocks, ending up with a vacation home in Palm Springs, Calif., driving a Mercedes and owning 10 companies at one time.

“I was an entrepreneurial guy. I worked seven days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day every day. I made a small fortune,” he said.

But much of that fortune came at the expense of relationships. Now he wants a second chance at family after years of neglect. He regrets not forming strong bonds with his children. He hopes the love of his life since he was 16 will see him again.

“My life has pretty much been mutilated, and without my family, I'm essentially a walking dead man,” he said.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

The Hofstra false rape case is the highest profile false rape since Duke Lacrosse. It made the cover page of the New York Post and has become a campaign issue in the race for District Attorney in Nassau County. Finally. If you haven't done it yet, please watch this "news" report that was prepared after the falsely accused were arrested but before the recantation -- but make sure you are sitting down and that there are no sharp objects nearby when you watch it: See here

The former Nassau County prosecutor hoping to unseat District Attorney Kathleen Rice in the November election said Saturday that Rice "avoided the judicial process" in deciding not to prosecute the woman who falsely reported she was gang-raped at Hofstra University two weeks ago.

In an agreement with the district attorney's office signed Friday, the accuser, Danmell Ndonye, 18, of Washington Heights, again admitted she made up a story about being tied up and raped in a dorm bathroom in the early morning hours of Sept. 13 - a story that resulted in the arrests of four men.

Ndonye agreed to undergo counseling and perform 250 hours of community service. In return, she was not charged with making a false written statement, a misdemeanor.

The candidate, Joy Watson, who headed sex-crime prosecutions under former District Attorney Denis Dillon, said the seriousness of the accusation and the impact on the accused men warranted a criminal prosecution.

"I certainly would have held her to the charge," Watson said while campaigning in Westbury. "I would have charged her and let the probation department and the court make a determination as to the appropriate sentence."

Ndonye, a Hofstra freshman, told Nassau police Sept. 13 that she was lured to a dormitory bathroom, where she was tied in a stall with a rope and raped by five men. A 21-year-old Hofstra student and three others were arrested and charged with first-degree rape; the fifth man was never arrested.

Ndonye recanted her story Sept. 16 in an interview with Nassau prosecutors after they told her there might be a cell-phone video of the incident.

Charges against the men were dismissed that day and they were released from jail; their lawyers said the video showed consensual sex. Hofstra suspended Ndonye and reinstated Rondell Bedward, of the Bronx, the only Hofstra student among those arrested.

"If the system is going to say, 'You're troubled, so you're not going to get charged,' what kind of reverberations does that send through the entire judicial system?" asked Watson, who is running on the Republican and Conservative lines. Rice is a Democrat.

Rice spokesman Eric Phillips said the district attorney "got to the truth quickly, got four innocent guys out of jail and held their accuser accountable." He called Watson "a candidate . . . whose political pandering has given us all an insight into her 'Shoot first and ask questions later' philosophy of justice."

Shamecka Bedward, 24, the sister of Rondell Bedward - the only one of the men with whom Ndonye said she did not have sexual contact - spoke briefly Saturday at the family's apartment in the Bronx. She said only that he was back at school and that the family was speaking with lawyers.

The staff at the nearby Mi Bodega said they were happy Bedward's name had been cleared.

"That's good people. That lady, she was talking too much and look now, nothing happened," said owner Eugenio Brito, 45.

"I'm happy he's back. Everybody in the neighborhood is surprised he went through all that, because he is a good man, trust me," said store employee Pablo Amanzar, 35.

Attorneys for two of the other men charged said that they had discussed the possibility of civil suits but that such action by their clients was unlikely.

"I brought in a civil attorney I trust who reviewed it and found, unfortunately, there really is no case," said Victor Daly-Rivera, who represents the family of Kevin Taveras, 20, of Brentwood.Attorney Jon Silveri said he had advised the family of Stalin Felipe, 19, of the Bronx, to consult with a civil expert.

There is much utility in having a high profile false rape accuser sign off on a sworn statement admitting she falsely accused young men of rape. The cackling false rape "denialists" will have a difficult time spinning the clear words of this document. And even if Ndonye had been charged, there was no guarantee of a conviction, and even less of a more substantial punishment than she voluntarily agreed to.

But ultimately that is no substitute for a criminal charge. Criminals get charged with crimes. Powerless, troubled, angelic-like beings do not. Ndonye committed a very serious crime that generally isn't treated very seriously for the reasons I discussed yesterday, and this high-profile case provided a perfect opportunity to send a powerful message that the criminal justice system does not favor one class of victims, rape victims, over another, false rape claim victims. Bronx attorney Victor Daly-Rivera, who represents one of the young false rape claim victims here, said it best: "We feel that the law was broken and she should be made to answer for that," Daly-Rivera said. "People are prosecuted all the time for filing false insurance claims and things like that . . . When you compare that to accusing four men of rape, it sort of pales by comparison." The step-mother of one of the young men agreed: "He still gets flashbacks," she said. "It's not fair. She has to pay for that. All the family got hurt because of her."

Rice issued a statement justifying her decision not to charge Ndoyne with a crime: "There exists no perfect solution to this case, only our best attempt at holding her accountable while encouraging real victims to come forward and accusers to tell the truth, so that we can avoid incarcerating an innocent person for even one minute."

That is code-speak for the following: "We mustn't do anything to interfere with the real war, the war on rape. Victims of false rape claims be damned." Rice threw four innocent young minority men under the bus in the interest of appeasing the politicized sexual grievance industry.

And Rice's timing was perfect, Simple Justice explained: "Timing is key to the success of this maneuver. By Monday, when people get back to paying attention to the news, this will be an old story. The Saturday paper is the least read paper of the week. Over the weekend, nobody will know. By Monday, nobody will care."

Rice isn't the only culprit here. The lenient statutory laws of New York that treat this sort of misconduct as practically non-criminal are also the problem. AsEllis Hennican said: "Even if the young woman were charged, Rice added, state law only allows for a misdemeanor. Is New York law really that weak? A person can accuse another of a horrible felony without facing any serious charge? Maybe that's where this discussion should turn next."

The bottom line about Rice's statement? Simple Justice sums it up: "It does . . . have a strong connection to encouraging false accusations, since the conditions of counseling and community services offer little disincentive to not take the risk." As I explained yesterday, we live not in a rape culture but in a false rape culture "where it is far more important to protect our daughters than our sons, so even far-fetched allegations of rape, even the possibility of rape, are not endured for one moment, but false rape claims that destroy our sons are not merely tolerated, they are tacitly encouraged."

But, hey, at least The New York Times ran an AP story that not only printed the false accuser's name but explained how it is pronouced (en-DAHN'-yeh). Now if only the Times would explain how an entire class of victims continually are forced to watch as the persons who harmed them walk away unpunished, well, maybe then the Times would be making a worthwhile contribution to issues related to gender crimes instead of being just a mouthpiece for misandrists.

Friday, September 25, 2009

*Ndoneye entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in which she swore, under oath, that she made a false rape claim (excerpt above). Full agreement here. (Do you think the feminist pundits will continue to insist that "something" happened in that restroom?)

A longer-than-usual post for an important subject. More than any single event since Duke lacrosse, the Hofstra false rape case has underscored a disturbing absence of concern for victims of false rape claims by those who dominate the public discourse about rape, radical feminists and their closely allied paid sexual assault counselors. Together, they make up what can aptly be called the sexual grievance industry. They have twisted and pounded the plain facts of the Hofstra incident to extract lessons from it that are diametrically opposed to the actual lesson Hofstra teaches. Their screeds are written for like-minded zealots and are lacking in either compassion for an entire gender or common sense.

The facts

We all know the story: four young men were arrested in a classic rush to judgment based on the word of a lone accuser despite the young men's sincere denials. The police appeared to side with the accuser. Bail was set at astronomically high levels to insure they would remain jailed. And it is no surprise to learn how they were treated in jail: "Publicly branded as rapists, the men said they were hounded as the lowest type of criminal in prison and feared for their lives. 'They were harassing me more than anybody else, just because of what I was in there for,' [one of the men said]. '[The guards] were badgering me. They would push me and shove me. I thought I was dreaming. The worst part was hearing that I could do 25 years. I'm not even 25 years old. I'm just 19.'" The mainstream news media chimed in to make sure everyone believed that a rape had actually occurred despite the flimsy evidence. Reporters came on television and described the alleged attack with a solemnity and a gravitas usually reserved for the death of a president.

The District Attorney's office refused to charge the false accuser immediately. "[Kathleen] Rice's spokesman Eric Phillips said the district attorney 'doesn't make snap judgments or let political expedience replace diligent fact-finding in investigations . . . . '" (Oh, you mean the same way you conducted "diligent fact-finding" and refused to make a "snap judgment" in arresting four young men on the say-so of a lone female, without examining all the evidence and without waiting to see the video, right?) Some said Danmell Ndonye shouldn't be charged at all. "Lois Schwaeber, director of legal services for the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said cases where people make false reports of rape hurt all legitimate rape victims seeking justice. But she said prosecuting someone who has made a false report will discourage real rape victims from coming forward as well." Gynocetrism, and it's indifference to the plight of males, is a hallmark of radical feminism. Ms. Schwaeber did not explain, of course, why it is somehow appropriate to elevate the victimization of one group of citizens (rape victims) over that of another (false rape victims). It gets worse: the Distric Attorney's office refused even to release Ndonye's name, because "her actions and her demeanor depict a very troubled young woman in need of much help." Imagine, if you will, a district attorney saying the same thing about an accused rapist. She would be run out of office. The New York Times didn't publish her name, either, but what should we expect from a paper that has yet to name Crystal Gail Mangum?

The reaction

The anti-male vitriol was sadly predictable. Consider a writer named Deborrah Cooper. Ms. Cooper presumably read the same news accounts that the rest of us read but has transmogrified them into a dark and twisted feminist fairy tale that fits radical feminism's victim metanarrative. Hers may be the single most misandric piece of writing I've come across in a long time. She concludes that Danmell Ndonye -- the criminal, the false rape accuser -- was the one who was "victimized" at a rape "party." Ms. Cooper weaves a fantastic nightmare of abduction, assault, and rape perpetrated against Ndonye that reads like a feminist "Pulp Fiction" in its utter depravity and violence. It is replete with Ndonye pleading while the vile men laugh at her and congratulate each other for their score. Ms. Cooper concludes that the "boys" (I can't imagine Ms. Cooper would think it appropriate to call the false accuser a "girl") are "sick," and that anyone who believes Ndonye consented to sex must be "real simple minded." Yeah, that's what Ms. Cooper said, "real simple minded." With no evidence beyond her serene ipse dixit and a fantastically large anti-male chip on her shoulder, Ms. Cooper knows that the young woman said "Stop it!," "I want to leave!" "Get off me!" and "Help!"

Ms. Cooper's language is a case study in misandry: "Like rutting animals one after the other - posing her, plunging in and out of her like beasts, using her body for their sexual satisfaction while others cheer him on and await their turn. What happened in that bathroom was not sex – it is sexual perversity and objectification of women." Ms. Cooper regales the reader with made-up facts about how even though the angelic "victim" was humiliated and frightened, she acceded to the men's horrid desires simply to save her life. "I guess we should be happy that these five aren't murderers," she opines, presumably with a straight face. The "victim" couldn't have consented, Ms. Cooper concludes, because "the victim is in a nasty men's bathroom smelling of urine, and on a cold tile floor." (Because, you know how men pee all over the floor and everything, just to be vile.) How does Ms. Cooper know what really happened? Because "[a]s an advice columnist for the past 20 years, I have a handle on how men think, the rage men have towards women that deny them, and the fears and vulnerability young women have." You see, it is not enough that men must never question a woman's "experience," men must also never question women who claim they know men's experience.

Oh, the young man who made the video -- you know, the video that prevented the falsely accused from serving 25 years in prison for a crime they didn't commit -- he "is the most twisted" one of all, according to Ms. Cooper. She doesn't stop there, she unloads a sort of feminist-diarrhea-of-the-keyboard about how "[m]ore and more men seem to feel entitled to women's bodies" and about sexual "comments and gestures." On and on she blathers, one twisted assertion cascades atop the next until they collapse upon one another to form a Rorschach inkblot of unmistakable misandry. It is not shocking that someone could be consumed by such fanatical hatred because, after all, the world is full of loons. What is shocking is that her words are published somewhere, anywhere.

And she's not alone. A Women's Studies major at George Washington University named Juliette Dallas-Feeney used the false rape claim at Hofstra to raise awareness about an entirely different crime, rape. She writes in the GW Hatchet: "The incident at Hofstra is a wake-up call for GW and all universities to answer the problem of rape on campus." And an arson is a wake-up call to raise awareness about burglary, right, Ms. Dallas-Feeney? Either Ms. Dallas-Feeney doesn't understand that she has posited a non sequitur or she lacks the intellectual honesty to give a damn. "Whatever [the young woman's] reasons [for recanting], it's doubtful we'll ever know her true intentions because these situations are all purely speculative." (Funny, later on her piece, Ms. Dallas-Feeney cites stats about the alleged prevalence of rape and doesn't bother to mention that those stats, by necessity, must be "purely speculative," too. But I guess that's somehow different? We can't possibly ever know that a rape claim is really false, but of course we can assume that virtually all rape claims were actual rapes, right, Ms. Dallas-Feeney?)

And it doesn't stop there. Amateur pundits on feminist blogs were atwitter with their usual attempts to minimize the prevalence of false rape claims in the face of overwhelming evidence that false rape claims are very common. Some openly ridiculed the concern shown for the falsely accused by asking why we assume their good names have been forever tarnished. The answer, sadly, is evident in articles written by people like Deborrah Cooper and Juliette Dallas-Feeney, who insist that what happened either was rape or that no one will ever really know what happened because it's "all purely speculative." So the young men are branded forever as either rapists or potential rapists, yet the feminists don't understand why that's a problem.

The radical feminists had their usual help from chivalrous men, radical feminism's useful idiots. A writer named Michael Daly entered the misandry hall of fame with this gem: "The five were freed after getting the good scare that they well deserved."

The lesson

In the end, Ndonye was treated by many as the "victim" and the five young men were treated as depraved sexual predators. The entire sordid affair was being talked about as yet another example of "rape culture," a way of life where males objectify and victimize females for their own personal gratification. She might have legally consented, but it was not really consent. No woman would really consent to engage in such depravity. Now, men . . . that's an entirely different story, of course, because men are vile, depraved, and beyond redemption.

Lost on too many is the undeniable fact that it appears a vicious crime was committed against five innocent young men. Period. Since the encounter appears to have been consensual, it was not rape, nor was it some sort of "rape lite." Yes, it was a wild, and unfortunate consensual hook-up, probably far more common than many of us would like to think. But this has nothing to do with criminality. As Cathy Young explained, the conduct of the young men wasn't "attractive behavior, to be sure. Yet we always have been told that rape victims don't need to be angels or models of chastity to deserve support. Surely the same should apply to men who are falsely accused." When the shoe is on the other foot, feminists cry "victim blaming" any time someone brands rape victims' conduct as lacking in morality. Somehow the same doesn't apply to false rape victims.

The fact is, if the "boys'" sexual escapades were troublesome, so was the "girl's," and, if it weren't for her lie about what happened in that rest room, what they did together would have been a private matter -- a matter that wouldn't concern the police, the courts, the news media, the feminist pundits, the chivalrous males, or any of us. She is a free moral agent, not a meek and powerless angelic being in dire need of society's protection from vile male predators who like to force women to have sex on urine-soaked tile floors. For more than forty years, feminists have insisted that women are at least as smart and as capable as men and more than able to make their own decisions, thank you very much. When feminists turn around and insist that, when it comes to sex, women are, in fact, utterly powerless, they set their own cause back by decades just to achieve an expedient victory in a sort of twisted Oppression Olympics.

All of the hand-wringing that insists Danmell Ndonye is a victim who could not possibly have consented, and that the men are evil sex predators, accomplishes the seemingly impossible task of insulting two genders at one time. First, it is insults women because it is sexist in the extreme, implying that they are either too stupid or too weak to act as free moral agents capable of making even fantastically dumb choices when it comes to sex, and that they need an unholy alliance of radical feminists and chivalrous guardian angel males to protect them from the male evildoers.

Second, it insults men because it suggests that when men and women engage in consensual, albeit fantastically stupid sex, the men must be the predators, the women must be innocent victims, and that later, when the women try to destroy the mens' lives by crying "rape," the women shouldn't be charged but the men will get the "good scare" they well deserve.

The misandry at work here is breathtaking. The lesson of Hofstra is that we live not in a rape culture, but in a false rape culture. It is a culture where it is far more important to protect our daughters than our sons, so even far-fetched allegations of rape, even the possibility of rape, is not endured for one moment, but false rape claims that destroy our sons are not merely tolerated, they are tacitly encouraged. It is a culture where we allow the persons who dominate the public discourse about rape to tell lies about our daughters by pretending they are powerless, angelic creatures, and about sons by pretending they are demonic, lying predators. Hofstra merely underscored that any culture that insists women can be "empowered" by telling lies will never achieve true gender equality. Sadly, the persons who supposedly are the most concerned about gender equality are just fine with that, thank you very much.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

The recent incident at Hofstra University, in which a student claimed that she was gang-raped in a men's room, has reignited the ongoing and often bitter debate about false accusations of rape. Are false rape charges a serious problem exacerbated by feminist claims that women don't lie about rape? Or is the issue being blown out of proportion to discredit feminists and cast doubt on the credibility of rape victims? Should women who bring false accusations be prosecuted or treated as troubled people who need help?

The Hofstra incident seems to be a classic case of a woman "crying rape" after consensual sex was followed by regrets. The woman said she was lured to a bathroom during a fraternity party, tied to a toilet stall with a rope and raped by five men. The men were arrested and briefly jailed before one of them produced a cell phone video filmed during the encounter, showing consensual sex. Confronted with the video, the woman recanted.

Many feminists argue that the problem of false accusations is so minuscule that to discuss it extensively is a harmful distraction from the far more serious problem of rape. On the other side are men's-rights activists, claiming that false accusations are as much of a scourge as rape itself.

In the 1970s, the feminist anti-rape movement championed the credibility of women for a good reason: At the time, the belief that rape charges are often made up out of vindictiveness or hysteria often caused victims to be treated as if they were the criminals. Unfortunately, rigid feminist dogma replaced one set of prejudices with another. Law professor Catharine MacKinnon has written that "feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men."

Building a belief system around believing someone's claims on the basis of gender is a sure prescription for bias. In 2006, when several members of the men's lacrosse team at Duke University were charged with raping a stripper at a team party, many feminist commentators, such as New England School of Law professor and former prosecutor Wendy Murphy, insisted on a presumption of guilt toward the accused men, despite indications that the story could be a hoax. The men were eventually exonerated.

FBI statistics show that about 9 percent of rape reports are "unfounded" - that is, dismissed without charges being filed. This usually happens when the accuser recants or when her story is contradicted by evidence. Some studies put the rate of false accusations at one in four or even higher. While no one knows the true figures, it is clear that the problem is real and its consequences can be devastating. The lacrosse players at Duke lived through a yearlong legal nightmare and were publicly branded as rapists. False accusations have sent men to prison for months or even years.

Yet some of the commentary on the Hofstra case has shown more sympathy to the accuser than the falsely accused men. On Slate, Emily Bazelon writes, "Let's agree that something disturbing happened to that 18-year-old woman at Hofstra. Something she feels awful about."

The assumption is that a drunken sexual encounter in a bathroom is something that "happens" to a woman, and if she "feels awful" when she sobers up and has regrets, she deserves a measure of support and understanding. (In fact, the woman's false accusation may have been less a reaction to guilt and shame than an attempt to conceal her escapades from her boyfriend, who saw her immediately afterward.)

Meanwhile, some are expressing harsh judgment of the men for engaging in group sex in a bathroom and filming it. This is not attractive behavior, to be sure. Yet we always have been told that rape victims don't need to be angels or models of chastity to deserve support. Surely the same should apply to men who are falsely accused.

To recognize that some women wrongly accuse men of rape is not anti-female, any more than recognizing that some men rape women is anti-male. There is power in a charge as uniquely damaging as rape, and women are no less likely than men to abuse the power they have. To recognize this fact is not "backlash" but basic fairness.

Danmell Ndonye, a freshman at Hofstra University in New York, made the news last week after she accused five men of tying her up and taking turns sexually assaulting her in the bathroom stall of a campus dorm.

Police acted quickly and arrested four of the accused rapists soon after Ndonye reported the crime. They spent the next 22 hours in jail while the media broadcast their names and faces across the country. The men were only released when the fifth suspect showed police video of the rendezvous that proved Ndonye had lied and the sex was consensual.

Confronted with the truth, Ndonye recanted her story and confessed to police she had made it up because she had been afraid to tell her boyfriend about the illicit encounter.

If the story sounds familiar, it should. It’s eerily reminiscent of the controversy that erupted in March 2006 when a stripper hired to dance at a party for the Duke University lacrosse team falsely accused several men on the team of raping her. Due to a lack of any corroborative evidence, investigators eventually dropped all charges against the players, though over a year after they were first accused and long after state prosecutors and media personalities had done irreparable damage to their reputations.

When it comes to crimes of sexual assault, we seem to always be in a rush to accuse and condemn the alleged perpetrators. Faced with such heinous crimes, we disregard the judicial process, favoring the rights of the victim and ignoring the rights of the accused.

Several studies show that the problem of false reports of rape may be greater than we realize:A review of 556 rape accusations filed against Air Force personnel found that 27 percent of women later recanted.

According to a 1996 Department of Justice report, “in about 25 percent of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI ... the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing.”

In a nine-year study of 109 rapes reported to the police in a Midwestern city, Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin reported that in 41 percent of the cases the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred. In a follow-up study of rape claims filed over a three-year period at two large Midwestern universities, Kanin found that of 64 rape cases, 50 percent turned out to be false.

When the mere accusation of sexual assault can ruin a life, these numbers are frightening.

This controversy isn’t about men versus women, he said/she said. It’s about truth. The men Ndonye accused of rape were in jail for nearly a day before they were released. If not for video evidence, they may have spent 25 years in prison for first-degree rape.

They were proven innocent, but the damage to their reputations has already been done.

“Anytime anyone Googles my name, rape is going to be right there beside it. My name is forever tarnished,” one of the five men accused by Ndonye said in a recent New York Post article.

If women feel they’ve been sexually assaulted, they should report it to the police. Always. But they should never make a false accusation and ruin someone’s life simply because they’ve done something they regret.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should be more careful about condemning the accused before they have a chance to prove themselves innocent. Guilty or not, that’s their right.

ATLANTA, September 15, 2009—The abuse of campus sexual harassment policies to punish dissenting professors has hit a new low at East Georgia College (EGC) in Swainsboro. Professor Thomas Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out—at a sexual harassment training seminar—that the school's sexual harassment policy contained no protection for the falsely accused. Two days later, in a Kafkaesque irony, Thibeault was fired by the college president for sexual harassment without notice, without knowing his accuser or the charges against him, and without a hearing. Thibeault turned to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

"If you were to write a novel about the abuse of sexual harassment regulations to get rid of a dissenter, you couldn't do better than the real-life story of Thomas Thibeault," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "Anyone with a modicum of respect for freedom of speech or simple fairness should be aghast at this blatant abuse of power by East Georgia College."

Thibeault's ordeal started shortly after August 5, 2009 when, during a faculty training session regarding the college's sexual harassment policy, he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, "what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?" Vice President for Legal Affairs Mary Smith, who was conducting the session, replied that there was no such provision to protect the accused, so Thibeault responded that "the policy itself is flawed."

Two days later, Thibeault was summoned to EGC President John Bryant Black's office. According to Thibeault's written account of the meeting, which was sent to Black and which Black has not disputed, Thibeault met with Black and Smith. Black told Thibeault that he "was a divisive force in the college at a time when the college needed unity" and that Thibeault must resign by 11:30 a.m. or be fired and have his "long history of sexual harassment ... made public." This unsubstantiated allegation took Thibeault by surprise. Black added that Thibeault would be escorted off campus by Police Chief Drew Durden and that Black had notified the local police that he was prepared to have Thibeault arrested for trespassing if he returned to campus. At no point was Thibeault presented with the charges against him or given any chance to present a defense. Refusing to resign, Thibeault understood that he was fired.

Most likely realizing that he had fired Thibeault without any of the due process mandated by Georgia's Board of Regents, Black then began attempting to justify Thibeault's firing after the fact. On August 11, Black wrote Thibeaultto say that since Thibeault had failed to resign by the deadline, "EGC has begun dismissal proceedings. ... [A] faculty committee has been appointed to conduct an informal inquiry." He then paradoxically wrote, "Their charge is to advise me whether or not dismissal proceedings shall be undertaken." Meanwhile, Thibeault still had not been provided with any charges, he was still banned from campus, and he still appeared to be fired-with the "dismissal proceedings" occurring after the fact.

Then, on August 25, Black wrote Thibeault again, claiming for the first time that Thibeault had actually been suspended, not fired: "the committee's finding was that there is sufficient evidence to support your suspension." Black added that Thibeault was about to be terminated for sexual harassment, that the charges finally would be sent upon request, and that Thibeault finally could request a hearing. Thibeault requested the charges on August 28 but has received no response. His lawyer also has inquired for weeks with no response.

"How can a public college professor in the United States be fired and kicked off campus by the president and police but, more than a month later, still have no idea why?" asked Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE's Individual Rights Defense Program. "Do Georgia's taxpayers know this is how their colleges are treating their professors?"

FIRE outlined many of these shocking violations of due process and freedom of speech in a letter to University System of Georgia Chancellor Erroll B. Davis Jr. on August 27, with copies to Black and Smith. None of them has responded. Neither Black nor Smith has even bothered to comment on the discrepancies between Thibeault's account and Black's erratic letters.

"It is hard to imagine a worse failure of due process in this case," Kissel said. "Nobody knows what the actual allegations are because they are being kept secret, even from Thibeault himself. In the stunning absence of any charges, evidence, or hearings, it is clear that EGC has punished Professor Thibeault for speaking out against a flawed harassment policy."

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, due process, freedom of expression, academic freedom, and rights of conscience at our nation's colleges and universities. FIRE's efforts to preserve liberty on campuses across America are described at thefire.org.

Tell EGC to restore the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Georgia Board of Regents. Write a letter to EGC and the Board of Regentshere.

A WOMAN who triggered a major investigation after claiming she was the victim of a sex attack in Carlisle has been charged with perverting the course of justice.

The 22-year-old is expected to appear in court following an alleged sexual assault in Cavendish Terrace, Stanwix, on January 4.

She answered police bail yesterday

The charge against her states that between January 3 and March 21, with intent to pervert the course of public justice, she made a false allegation that she was subject to a serious sexual assault which instigated a major police investigation during which four people were arrested.

That, the charge adds, had a tendency to pervert the course of public justice contrary to common law.

Detectives’ investigation into the claims was one of the biggest manhunts seen in Carlisle in recent years.

That probe involved some of Cumbria Police’s most senior detectives in a special incident room staffed by between 30 and 40 officers.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

This morning, a reader in Pittsburgh alerted me to a news story about a teenager who claimed she was raped. She supposedly was dragged to a wooded area, blah, blah, blah. The reader said he would bet every dollar he had that this will turn out to be a false rape claim. I told him I agreed, that it had all the markings of a typical false rape claim. The following story appeared later in the day -- she wanted to avoid getting in trouble, so she saw fit to slander an entire gender:

1. One wonders if Ms. Dunsmore was offered a deal for a reduction of her sentence for her testimony.

2. Almost 20 years between when this incident is supposed to have occurred and the trial for one of the men, and between 15 and 22 years for the other. How can anyone mount a defense after that amount of time?

The trial of two men accused of raping a 10-year-old girl at a Perthshire caravan park has been adjourned after a key witness retracted her testimony.

Caroline Dunsmore, 46, had told the High Court in Dunfermline that she had watched television as her daughter, Dana Fowley, was raped in a bedroom.

However, under cross-examination, she said her initial testimony in this case had been a "mistake" and was not true.

Neil Kendall and Ian Davidson deny raping Ms Fowley in 1990.

During the second day of the trial, Dunsmore told Mhairi Richards, QC for Mr Kendall, that he had not had sex with Ms Fowley.

On Friday, Dunsmore had described to prosecutor Joanna Cherry QC how Ms Fowley was raped by the two men after being encouraged to by her former husband William King.

She also told the court that she had had sex with Mr King while Dana was raped in the same room.

Dana Fowley has waived her right to anonymity in the case.

However, during re-examination, Ms Cherry asked Dunsmore: "Why have you changed your evidence?"

Dunsmore replied that she had made up the events at the caravan park "probably because I was scared of Paul" - a reference to Ms Fowley's current partner Paul Kernachan.

Ms Cherry asked her: "You have given two different accounts - which is the true version?"

Dunsmore replied: "I never seen it."

Special defence

Dunsmore, who is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence for her part in abuse of her daughter, broke down in tears as she recalled her own role.

She said she had gone to the police voluntarily at the start of 2006 to speak about events involving her daughter.

At the end of the interview she was arrested.

She agreed that she had said at the time that she wanted "it all out in the open", remarking afterwards "I'm so happy that it's over".

Mr Kendall, 44, of Citadel Place in Edinburgh, denies raping Dana Fowley while acting with others at the caravan park between 30 April 1990 and 27 June 1990.

He has lodged a special defence of alibi, claiming he was not within the caravan at the time of the rape, and a separate special defence of incrimination, claiming the attack was carried out by three other men.

Mr Davidson, 54, of Murrayburn Place, Edinburgh, denies two charges of rape and two of using lewd, indecent and libidinous practices towards the girl by having sex with Dunsmore in front of her, and forcing her to perform an oral sex act on him.

The alleged offences involving Mr Davidson happened between February 1987 and June 1994 at various addresses in Edinburgh.

He has lodged a special defence of alibi, claiming he was living at various addresses in Manchester at the time.

Prof. KC Johnson, guru of the Duke Lacrosse fales rape spectacle, is following Hofstra, and among other things, he writes:

"[T]he New York Times covered the accuser’s recantation in an article penned by Anahad O’Connor. O’Connor’s article shielded Ndonye’s name, yet included the names and ages of the four men she falsely accused. Even assuming that a rationale exists for shielding the names of false accusers (which is quite a stretch in and of itself), what possible rationale could exist for not reporting the name of the false accuser while simultaneously reporting the names of the people she falsely accused? I e-mailed O’Connor for comment, but have not received a reply; if I do, I will post it."

You want to know why Ms. O'Connor didn't write back? Because she knows that by any reasonable measure, the practice Prof. Johnson complained of is wholly indefensible. It is a sorry vestige of radical feminism that purports to empower women by pretending they are powerless. It is yet one more example of a wrongheaded, politicized policy that treats the falsely accused as collateral damage in "the more important" war on rape.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A murderer tried to claim that her sick and disabled victim tried to rape her. It didn't work. It's not enough for some women to kill a man, they must also destroy his reputation in the process. H/t to John K.

Due to strange typo when we redid our "About this website" paragraph on the right side of the page, our email address was wrong. It's been corrected. If you tried to send us something and you didn't get a response, please try again. Sorry about that. t/t John B.